6.Conclusion

1 lesson, 00:46

2.1 After Effects Setup

Hi everyone, and welcome back to creating mods and glitch animations in After Effects. In this lesson, we'll be going through our initial setup and just familiarize ourselves with the tools we'll be using throughout the course. If you're already familiar with using After Effects, you can skip to the next video now and get started on preparing the animation. So we'll just get started by taking a look at loading up the correct workspace layout for After Effects. To do this, go to Window &gt; Workspace and then click on Standard. You'll also notice that there are some other workspace options here such as animation and you can see that that changes the layout here and effects. But for now, we'll just stick to Standard as this is the layout that we'll be using for the course. So now that we have our workspace loaded, let's go into a quick introduction at what we'll be looking at here. The workspace in After Effects is made out of panels and frames. So if you just take a look at the tabs around here such as Paragraph Characters, Preview, and these tabs here. These are called panels, each panel is placed within a frame that we can easily adjust the size of by moving our mouse over the sort of an edge of the frame here. And then clicking and dragging the mouse to make it larger or smaller. So this could be useful if you wanted to see more options within your panel. So you can see here in this panel, we've got different tabs here such as Effects, Libraries, and Character. So these tabs here, so by enlarging the panel here we can see, enlarging of the frame here we can see more of the panels. We can also move the panels to different areas of the workspace. To do this, simply grab one of the panels and using the mouse, click and drag the mouse over to a different area. You'll notice now that the area now has different drop zones that are highlighted as you move your mouse over them. Release the mouse button, and you'll have a new placement for your panel, like so. So now, you can see that I moved the Effects panel from here to down here. Now, the placement of the panel depends on the drop zone area. So for example, if you place the panel on the outer edges of the frame, like so, you'll see that the panel is dropped on the edge of the screen. However, if you wanted to put the tab within a frame, you'll want to drop the panel inside the center drop zone area, like so. And now you'll see that it's added a tab into the frame. Again, if you wanted to put next to it just put it on one of the edges. So if I wanted it to the side or if I wanted it on top here, or if I wanted it on the bottom, like so. That is how you move the panels around. Another trick that you might find useful is to make a panel float. Now, this is mainly useful for those of you with two or more monitors, say if you wanted the Effect controls on your second monitor. To do this, simply click and drag the panel to move it as you would normally. And whilst holding the mouse button, hold the Ctrl key on the keyboards, or the Cmd key if you're using a Mac. And this would change the look of the panel, like so. Simply release the mouse and keyboard key to create your new floating panel, excellent. So let's go ahead and move this back into where it was originally. Just moving it back to this frame here. So if you wanted to change or if you wanted to save your new workspace. So if I wanted to keep the Effects controls on the side here or alternatively on the side here. Simply go to Window &gt; Workspace &gt; Save New Workspace. Now, you can title this workspace here, so let's go ahead and change this to New Workspace Test, click OK. Now, you can see when you go to Window &gt; WorkSpace here, you should see New Workspace Test saved there. So if you wanna ever wanted to go back to it or if you open Standard. Let's go ahead, I see Standard has already been edited here. So what we want to do is, we want to reset Standard and that'll go back to normal. And if you wanted to go back to your New Workspace Test here, just simply click on that, and you'll see your new workspace has appeared. So let's go back to the Standard Workspace, excellent. Now, in the Standard Workspace, so we'll mainly be focused on four different areas. The left area here will be the project panel, this is where you'll find all your resources of the project, such as imported logos and compositions that you've created. The bottom area here is where all your layers are kept, and the timeline of the composition, which is here. The sensor area here will be how you can preview your animation video. And finally, the right area here is where you'll find all the effects and presets that we'll use for the animation and also your video controls here in the Preview. So feel free to experiment with different workspace layouts and come up with something that you like. Remember that you can also always reset the layout by clicking on the reset button here if you want to go back to the original one. Or you can save the layout if you like it, excellent. In the next video, we'll start preparing the animation. See you all there.